Thursday, May 19, 2005

Crippled Detectives

in the VLS, a great piece by Ed Park about a really demented and brilliant and lovely novel written by a little girl called Lee Tandy Schwartzman in the mid-70s and published in the magazine Stone Soup: "If ever a book deserved to be published in a facsimile autograph edition, Crippled Detectives is it. Reading Schwartzman's manuscript is like walking into a sheet of sheer concrete poetry. Punctuation has gone AWOL, and the lettering generally leaves as much breathing room as a sequence of DNA. 'This has got to be great,' William Rubel, Stone Soup's other founding editor, recalled thinking, upon seeing the MS. 'You can't even read it!'"

I wonder if there is any way to get hold of a copy?

Random semi-related observation: the out-of-print children's book that I MUST GET SOMEONE TO REPRINT (actually, I'm thinking about trying to track down the author, find out what's up with the rights and persuade Soft Skull to do it) is The Great Escape: Or the Sewer Story by Peter Lippman. (This book is a work of genius. It's about cute little alligators that people buy as pets, then get rid of when they grow unattractively large; the alligators congregate in the NYC sewers and hatch a plan to return to their natural habitat in the Florida swamps. However, this summary does not do justice to one of the funniest and most attractively illustrated books of my childhood.) Our childhood copy seems to have vanished, last seen in an apartment of my brothers' circa 1993.

1 comment:

i came across your blog while searching for a copy of The Great Escape on Google. I loved that book as a kid...I think we should start a petition or something to get it reprinted. anyways, glad someone else out there remembers and appreciates such a great story. :)

About Me

I have published four novels and two books about eighteenth-century British literature; my latest book is "Reading Style: A Life in Sentences." I teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.